Stanley Lewis, who has an impressive reputation among painters and is one of the most highly respected art educators in the country, has M.F.A. and B.F.A. degrees from Yale and a B.A. from Wesleyan.  He was the recipient of a Danforth Fellowship from 1963-67.

He has been a teacher and/or visiting artist at Chautauqua Institute in New York, Smith College, Queens College, Vermont Studio Center, Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College, The New York Studio School, Bard College, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke, Yale University, Chicago of Art Institute, Vassar College, Haverford College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  From 1990 to 2002, he was professor of painting and drawing at American University in Washington, D.C.  He exhibits widely on a national level, and is represented by Salander O’Reilly Gallery in New York, where he had a major exhibition in 2004.

“Stanley Lewis is a landscape painter with a sculptor’s sensibility whose work never lets you forget he was there.  The thick paint on his canvases; the cut, moved and pasted pieces of paper; which create various levels and channels that run through his compositions; the torn, carved, cut-and-torn-again surfaces of his drawings, which build to five and six layers thick; all remind us of the process and hard work of picture making…

It seems, in Lewis’s drawings, that the more they are beaten, revived, and beaten again, the freer and more alive they become.  The drawings are beautiful, but beauty feels unintentional, a by-product of the pursuit of truth.  Lewis, in his desire to open up to his own vision of the world, takes us on a journey through each work’s own suffering, death and resurrection.”